Sony shakes up consumer electronics divisions

Sony, which is expected to be announcing it's first annual loss in the last 14 years, is restructuring their management team and consumer electronics divisions. Effective April 1. Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer will be taking on the additional title of President.

The reorganization of Sony's consumer electronics business appears to be aimed at coming up with a single vision for related products.

Their Playstation, VAIO, and Walkman product lines will be part of the new Networked Products & Services Group. It will also include Sony Media & software, who will be responsible for compatibility across those product lines.

The rest of Sony's consumer electronics lines will be part of the New Consumer Products Group. The Common Software and Technology team and Manufacturing/Logistics/Procurement team will be responsible for coordinating design and manufacturing strategies between the two groups.

This seems long overdue given Sony's apparent lack of focus across product lines. As the only company to manufacture PCs, multiple gaming platforms, and audio/video equipment you would hope they could do better in tough economic times.

At the same time, what it doesn't address is the apparent disconnect between Sony's consumer electronics and entertainment businesses. Despite owning both a major record label and movie studio, Sony has been unable to compete with the media offerings from Microsoft's Xbox Live! service.

Microsoft, which owns neither of those, has been able to leverage the gaming market into a home entertainment revenue stream. They've even connected their consoles to offerings outside of Xbox Live!, including Netflix Watch Instantly.

Sony originally marketed the PS3 as a complete home entertainment system. They have all the corporate assets necessary to make that a reality. Hopefully this corporate shakeup can do just that.

SONY's products are amazingly good, but what it lacks big time is on consumer service and proper update compatibility for their own products consuming line (long term service).

Also goes for all branches of SONY electronics and wireless phones. Whereas it seems that every product brand that carries SONY property logo it does not mean necessarily belongs to the same company.

Myself owning different SONY home entertainment such as electronics, Playstation and wireless phone... those are not compatible between them due lack of firmware or software compatibilities. And SONY won't offer any updates. I have contacted to the respective consumer representatives and always was told they can't do nothing about it. TOO BAD !

money wasted.

That's what is p!ss me off from SONY, I spent bunch of $$$ for nothing in return.

Playstation 3 is a good example of it, after over two years of released the best console with the best technology in the market is way behind and still struggling with the sale numbers, ask yourself... why?

I must agree that Sony has a lot of work to do to match their service to their products. I gave my college-age son a Sure-Shot camera and later needed to replace his lost charger. This particular model charges the battery when is been off-loaded from the camera. When they sent the wrong one I returned it when the correct charger was shipped. I have yet to receive (two months later) a credit to my credit card. I submitted a claim to my credit card provider. Since I've been with them for 45 years, they have credited my account the full $50 amount while they went back to Sony. Sony has the wrong, unused charger they shipped me, I should get my money back!

Originally posted by gmontalc: SONY's products are amazingly good, but what it lacks big time is on consumer service and proper update compatibility for their own products consuming line (long term service).

Also goes for all branches of SONY electronics and wireless phones. Whereas it seems that every product brand that carries SONY property logo it does not mean necessarily belongs to the same company.

Myself owning different SONY home entertainment such as electronics, Playstation and wireless phone... those are not compatible between them due lack of firmware or software compatibilities. And SONY won't offer any updates. I have contacted to the respective consumer representatives and always was told they can't do nothing about it. TOO BAD !

money wasted.

That's what is p!ss me off from SONY, I spent bunch of $$$ for nothing in return.

Playstation 3 is a good example of it, after over two years of released the best console with the best technology in the market is way behind and still struggling with the sale numbers, ask yourself... why?

It just comes down to not trusting a mega brand and understanding what of the brands in under the logo are qaulity or junk. And this is true of alot of manufactures.

Sony once had a well deserved rep for solid quality, excellent specs and all at a great value price.

No longer.

Now their products tend to demand a notably high premium for a less than impressive spec.

They lost their way some time ago and things like their continual proprietary nonsense (peaking with the outrage of their 'rootkit' BS) just typify the rotten state of what was once very decent.

Their fanboys will refuse to see it but the sales tell a different story.

PS3 is an excellent case in point, for all the heat and noise over it it's a game console now guaranteed to stay in 3rd and last place in this round of the console wars (after Sony said there will be no price cuts until the PS3 reached the point of profitability even after the price cut).

They spent a huge fortune gambling that everyone would be wowed by Blu-ray.
They lost.
It's not the big deal high-margin money-spinner they bet it would be and now they are watching prices slashed to close to DVD levels and sales still stalled.

Japanese exports down 45%.
The high Yen is killing them
(as well as the world economy taking the deepest dive in maybe 100yrs).

This is an economic nightmare unfolding and Sony - like probably most of the heavily export-dependant Japanese companies - are in big trouble.

Whilst i can see you spent a lot of time and effort in constructing your post, how about constructive comment and a bit of decorum. There's nothing wrong with not liking Sony but there's ways of saying things without comments such as yours..

Well said Creaky. BTW Sony is a piece of crap! Now that's more decorum. LOL.Sony is not really crap, but I hate how they try to lock you into their proprietary schemes and how overrated/overpriced their products are.

Mini Disc, revolutionary piece of hardware; too bad it recorded in proprietary ATRAC3 only. Digital cameras, great lenses; too bad they don't use regular flash media but their proprietary more expensive Memory Stick. LCD TV's, without a doubt great image quality, but you surely get more bang for the buck sticking to Panasonic or any other top brand. Those are few examples of my reasons to hate Sony, and I'm not even talking about the root kit incident...

Originally posted by hermes_vb: Well said Creaky. BTW Sony is a piece of crap! Now that's more decorum. LOL.Sony is not really crap, but I hate how they try to lock you into their proprietary schemes and how overrated/overpriced their products are.

Mini Disc, revolutionary piece of hardware; too bad it recorded in proprietary ATRAC3 only. Digital cameras, great lenses; too bad they don't use regular flash media but their proprietary more expensive Memory Stick. LCD TV's, without a doubt great image quality, but you surely get more bang for the buck sticking to Panasonic or any other top brand. Those are few examples of my reasons to hate Sony, and I'm not even talking about the root kit incident...

UDM is another good example if they focused on putting a slightly lower UDM version of a film with every sony DVD then sell special editions for 25$ UDM would not have been the trainwerck it was.

Their proprietary schemes tend to be poorly thought out and hope the brand power will fool people into how great something limited and crappy is like the 360.

If Sony would have used the mini-disk as a replacement for the floppy, they might have sold a ton of them, until cheap CD burners came out, of course. Then there's the SACD - DVD-A war that crippled high definition audio. Terrible, just terrible.
But the company that really got me mad was JVC. A long time ago I bought a SCSI cd-rom burner from them, and had nothing but trouble with it. One of their tech guys named Tom kept blaming me for the bad burns, when I knew I was doing nothing wrong. Finally I went over his head and was able to get a replacement from his supervisor. the experience left me so irate that I never bought another jvc product again. That's tens of thousands of dollars worth of purchases ago, and not one was a jvc. They would have been better off giving me the drive for free just to keep me as a happy customer.